Newest Tack

If a girl doesn't click, clink, clank or at least jingle this fall, she's just not part of the scene. The newest thing is the Hardware Look, and anything bright and metallic will do. There are chains to jangle at the waist, neck and wrist. Coats and pocketbooks come studded with nailheads, bells will tinkle along skirt hems, and shoes now have metal toggles and linked brass loops. Outsized zippers are on everything.

In Manhattan, Best & Co. has already opened its new boutique, "The Hardware Shop," and is urging its customers to "show their metal." On the same nuts-and-bolts theme, Bonwit Teller in Chicago is boasting that one of its belts, an Yves St. Laurent creation of plastic and gold-colored metal, is "causing a chain reaction."

The bright and brassy look has been clicking along for several years now. Florence's Gucci has made a trade mark of her small gold toggles for shoes; in Paris in 1966, Cardin made a big thing out of suits and dresses with big industrial zippers. Now hardware is everywhere, from teen-ager styles to haute couture.

Fashion Coordinator Ardelle Tuma, of Chicago's Carson Pirie Scott & Co., says hardware had to come: "With all the uncluttered look, designers started to give a new identity to silhouettes. Hardware is expressive and dramatic."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.